Humanism
History
The Historical Background of Humanism
Arran Gare:
"We know from the work of Hans Baron (1966), and following him, J.G.A. Pocock (1975/2003) and Quentin Skinner (2002a), that civic humanism emerged in the Florentine Renaissance, reviving ideas from the Roman Republic and Ancient Greece as part of the struggle to defend and advance the liberty achieved by northern Italian city states from the Holy Roman Empire, the Catholic Church, and later, from tyrants. Florence as a democratic republic (until this was overthrown by the Medici) was the centre of intellectual life in Italy, and Petrarch introduced the humanities as a form of education designed to inspire people to develop the virtues of wisdom, justice and courage to defend their liberty and participate as citizens in the governance of their republics. That is, the humanities were committed to fostering humanitas, or humanity, combining philanthrôpía (loving what makes us human) with paideia (education). Proponents of this were the civic humanists. As despotism displaced republican democracy, civic humanism took a more radical, egalitarian form, incorporating into it a radical form of Neo-Platonism that was elaborated into an entire cosmology. This was a pantheistic materialism and was characterized as “nature enthusiasm.” Giordano Bruno, who was burnt at the stake in 1600, was the foremost proponent of this.
The work of Margaret Jacob (1981/2003), Stephen Toulmin (1994), Quentin Skinner (2008) and others have shown that the major figures of Seventeenth Century scientific revolution: Marin Mersenne, Pierre Gassendi, René Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton and John Locke, were driven by hostility to these civic humanists and their republican ideals, and even more to their celebration of nature, and sought to develop a philosophy to replace their ideas. Toulmin (1996, p.24) characterized Descartes’ work and influence as the counter-Renaissance, and this characterizes the work of all these philosophers. They argued in opposition to Bruno that nature is just meaningless matter in motion. The most important of these philosophers for the future of modernity was Hobbes who developed a conception of humans as machines moved by appetites and aversions and characterized science as the accumulation of knowledge of causal relationships to facilitate control of nature and people. In accordance with this conception of humans and their knowledge, he argued that all thinking amounts to adding and subtracting, or as he put it:
- When a man Reasoneth, hee does nothing else but conceive a summe totall, from Addition of parcels; or conceive a Remainder, from Subtraction of one summe form another… These operations are not incident to Numbers onely, but for all manner of things that can be added together, and taken one from another. (Hobbes, 110)
The function of language is to register knowledge of causes, conveying it to others and
to make our will known to others, and apart from these functions, is simply playing
with words for amusement (101f.). History and literature are reduced to nothing but
forms of entertainment. Liberty is redefined as “nothing other than absence of
impediments to motion” (Skinner, 2008, p.109), with such motion being a
manifestation of internal motions of matter caused by external motions of matter.
Essentially, as Skinner has shown, Hobbes was attempting to transform
language so that the quest for autonomy and liberty as these had been understood in
the Ancient world and in the Renaissance, and the development of people’s character
to make these possible, would be unintelligible. This allowed political order to be
equated with conforming to the edicts of a tyrannical sovereign.
As Skinner (2002b,
p.13) wrote of this transformation of language:
Renaissance political writers had begun to describe self-governing communities as states, stati or états, and more specifically as stati liberi or free states. They tended as a result to equate the powers of the state with the powers of its citizens when viewed as a universitas or corporate body of people ... Hobbes dramatically reverses this understanding, arguing that it is only when we perform the act of instituting a sovereign to represent us that we transform ourselves from a multitude of individuals into a unified body of people. Hobbes was the original posthumanist.
Hobbes’s conception of humans was embraced and came to dominate modernity, usually in the watered-down form bequeathed by John Locke’s philosophy in which the goal of life was portrayed as maximising pleasure and minimizing pain rather than satisfying appetites and avoiding aversions, and plutocracy was defended rather than tyranny. Knowledge and reasoning were explained as interactions between what is given to the senses and decaying versions of what has been sensed, implying an utterly impoverished notion of the imagination. This notion of humans was incorporated into economic theory as homo economicus, displacing Renaissance economic theory which had focussed on the development of people and the arts as the basis of prosperity (Reinert & Daastøl, 2004). Subsequently, economic theory became the main discipline through which the ruling elites of societies, beginning with Britain and France, interpreted and legitimated themselves. As Robert Young (1985) showed, Hobbesian thought was strengthened in the Nineteenth Century by using economics as a metaphor for nature, and characterizing evolutionary progress not only in society but in nature as the outcome of the struggle for survival between competing machines. Nowadays, very much in accordance with Hobbesian thought, these machines are characterized as information processing cyborgs, the survival machines of DNA which itself is coded information. Similar concepts, including autopoiesis, that is, self-making based on second order cybernetics, now pervade the human sciences.
Through the work of Jacob (1986/2003), we also know that Renaissance thought, while suppressed at the beginning of the Eighteenth Century, survived. It survived in the Dutch Republic where it had influenced the work of Benedict Spinoza who had brought together all work that divinized nature and defended republicanism, and in Italy where the humanities were defended and further developed by Giambattista Vico. It also survived in the work of John Toland in Britain and in masonic guilds, particularly in the Dutch Republic, before being taken up in France by such figures as Jean-Baptiste Rousseau and Denis Diderot. Along with Leibniz, these outposts of humanism inspired what has since been called the German Renaissance as this developed at the end of the Eighteenth Century and beginning of the Nineteenth Century (Watson, 2010). This whole movement was dubbed the Radical Enlightenment by Jacob, a designation since taken up and elaborated on by Jonathan Israel (2002) who emphasised the role in it of Spinoza. Israel contrasted the Radical Enlightenment with what he called the Moderate Enlightenment, exemplified by Voltaire who proselytised the work of Newton and Locke. The Radical Enlightenment focussed on the mind, developing more adequate notions of imagination and reason to defend and redefine the reality of human freedom, and revived the pre-Socratic notion of nature as developed by Bruno and the Spinozists (who were also influenced by Leibniz’s physics) as creative process."